Harry ‘Tomi Davies (TD), chief executive officer, TechnoVision Communications and chairman, Mobile Monday (Nigeria), has seen it all in the wonderful world of information and communications technologies, having worked for over 30 years; seeing it evolve from the IBM 360 mainframe and X-25 dominated enterprise computing setting to the present sophisticated personal, pervasive internet, cloud computing and mobile device driven world.
TD had worked in the USA, UK, and Europe, Asia and Africa organizations, measuring from start-up to multi-national corporations.
In spite his tightschedule in the tech ecosystem, TD has authored articles and books and presented papers at major conferences across the globe on project management, technology & innovation and continues to be actively engaged as a consultant, advisor, speaker and mentor with investment interests in various companies.
He spoke to peter ugwu on TechnoVision’s approach to enhancing the fortunes of technology entrepreneurs in Nigeria, among other issue.

Technovision’s Mission in the Nigerian IT Space
The mission of TechnoVision is very simple. It is to help people use technology better. The whole idea is the fact that technology is a vision enabler.
I believe in futuristic-techprenure; I live in the future and the future belongs to technology. That’s why we are in the business of helping people foresee a future that is technology enabled.

TechnoVision’s Adopted Approach to Help Technoprenures?
We actually use the POEM framework as a guide for assessing techpreneurial opportunities. “P” stands for proposition.
We scrutinize your proposition within the context of the market. What is your vision for that particular market?
Who is that vision for? Because if you are not serving people or solving a problem, you are not really going to be creating value.
whole idea is: your proposition must innovate a solution for a particular set of people. Also, within the context of the proposition, what is the regulatory climate?
What is the competitive environment like? Once we see you have a viable proposition; that has significant market opportunity and a customer segment that is amenable to your proposition, then we say you have something.
The next thing we look at is the “O” which is Organization. How are you organized to create this value; because if you are not structured in your approach to developing value and rolling it out, sustainability will be lacking.
In organizations, we consider whether you area registered name, incorporated, partnership, limited, unlimited, limited by guarantee. In fact, what is the corporate governance? That is where we start from, because it will underpin the vision.
Additionally, who is going to manage this value creation process? Are you brining in a commercial manager or operational (competent) manager; is there a technically competent manager and what kind of staff capability are they looking at.
Not in the immediate, but in the long-term. That is what I earlier referred to as skills.
When we look at that, we would want to understand the processes you are going to use to create this value. Do you have suppliers and how are you going to buy from them.
Internally, what are your operational and production processes? If it were technology, what is your testing regime; how do you assess customer requirements? How does feedback come back into the whole requirements, et cetera.

Other Components Of The “POEM” Framework
When you are certain about the proposition and organization, we move to where everybody normally starts their focus on-which is the Economics or “Show me the money” to borrow a movie induced phrase. Unfortunately, most start ups attention tends to be inordinately focused on “E”. Until you understand the first two (that is your proposition and organisation), you may not get the money right.
You proposition will tell you, based on assumptions, what your revenue potential is and how you can get return on that capital when you employ it.
Your organization will also tell you the kind of expenditure that you will incur to create the value that will make those returns. So, if you consider what market sizes, what kind of trends are in the industry, you can get decent numbers to make a solid case from an economic standpoint for your value proposition.
After you have scaled the three you get to the “M”-the Milestones, which is about the plans. Everybody is talking about business plan. If you have not done the first three what are you planning!
The milestones are about the plan. Where are we now? How do you get to where you want to be? What steps to follow? Is it about raising money and for what?
For instance, we need space in the cloud. We need to empower our customers. These are key milestones that position you on the right track.
That is what I mean by POEM, which is the framework I recommend for all startups and we have showcased this through different concepts.

Where Technology Consideration Comes In?
So, as a techpreneur, you need to look at those things before you can look at the technology itself. The technology is about the future, there is no doubt about it. That is what I am now calling the device-to-cloud architecture.
Historically, we had client-server architectures. They may look and sound similar but there are fundamental differences. People were used to desktops, laptops, tablets, now we talk about laptops, tablets, mobile phones.
Some are even looking at Phablets, which is the combination of phones and tablets. But I just call them all devices. Why? They are all personal; they are peculiar to the individual as opposed to the old model where you could come and log on to my PC. Now, we carry our devices around and as we move along we will get to the age of wearables.
We are in the early stages of the age I have called intimate computing.
 We are moving away from personal to intimate computing where your computing devices are intimate to the individual. It is just like someone cannot lend you his reading glasses.
Though, we still lend our mobile devices to people to make quick calls, but it can’t exceed hours. It is going to get more intimate.
To explain further, by the time we begin to wear gadgets like Google Glass or Samsung Gear in their numbers, then we will appreciate the level the intimacy has reached.
On the back-end, when we had client server you would hear people make statements like: ‘I have my server in my office’-my mail server, web server, etc. all of those things are going, going, gone because we discovered, overtime, that we can’t really secure them, manage or maintain all the upgrades that are necessary nor as is especially the case in Nigeria even provide the basic infrastructure of power and physical security perennially. That is what is making the cloud very attractive.

The Pivotal Role of the Internet in Achieving Intimate Computing
The second is what sits between the device and the cloud which is the internet access. Historically, we lacked this, but with MainOne, Glo 1, Sat1, and other broadband internet access sources coming on board, you start to get the idea of where we are getting along to.
Principally, what has changed was, in the old days of client-server we had local area networks that connected everybody.
But the internet has made the cloud-device architecture possible. So with the Internet pervasively available, whether through MiFi, or hotspots, the truth is that you can now connect to your back-end with much more ease than just five years ago.
It means you can have thinner to diminishing clients. So, the device does not have to posses much sophistication.
We now have Android Smartphones that can surf the internet; they can run almost all the programmes that a N150,000 phones does, at the same time, they cost less than N20,000. In the particular example I am thinking of for instance, the only difference is that while my Nexus5 is on the latest version of the Android operating system (version 4.42) my Huawei Y220is a few steps behind on version 2.36.
From an experiential standpoint it means that the Smartphone has arrived and can only get better in terms of value for money.
So, if you take those three components as the architecture of the future, your device which has intelligence (it has locations and sensors), so it can monitor heartbeats, and can tell when you are ill; the cloud, which by nature is unlimited and broadband in-between the two, which means even if you are doing video streaming, you start to understand the art of the possible.

Importance of National Broadband Policy Implementation
If you have listened to the Honourable Minister of Communication Technology lately, you know it’s broadband policy that she is pushing.
As the first ComTech Minister we ever had, one of her lasting legacy to the country will be the fact that she did put up the framework for broadband; which is the infrastructure of the future for this (and just about any other) country.
That policy is rich and she is working assiduously on the implementation, which is quite amazing.
In my opinion the three top Ministries under the current dispensation with aggressive developmental drives are the ComTech, Agriculture and Trade& Investment. They are pushing (aggressively) industry specific agendas that empower the rest of the economy. I am quite optimistic; looking at the mobile network operators rolling out LTE which is again wireless broadband, while the Minister is focused on fibre. Between fibre and wireless, we will be awash with broadband in the near future.

The Concept of Mobile Monday
Mobile Monday is in over a hundred cities worldwide. It started in 2000 with an aim of bringing mobile industry players together, to innovate, enhance capacity and generally grow the ecosystem. So, it is an ecosystem facilitator for growth.

About The Devcon Alpha Devigner Contest
Devon Alpha has been slow because of different factors. For instance, the Windows phone platform is not the one MoMo developers are very keen on.
They are keener on Android. However, Nokia has done an excellent job in getting them keen. And the fact that the API from Verve, which is a homegrown payment platform, is also new means a learning curve for all with a new API on what is the second platform.
Android is first, Windows follows. On the second platform things have been quite slow on the up-take. Nevertheless, we are expecting some interesting results at the end of the day. 

Any Plans to Extend The Closing Date?
What we are doing, actually, is to showcase as we go along. Instead of giving a cut-off, we are going to be showcasing the best in a month or two, those that made it into the apps store during the period. So, it becomes a rolling-in thing. Then, the best of the lot in say the first six (6) month is declared the winner of the $300k worth of prizes.

How to Re-position Nigeria’s Software Entrepreneurship Development 
The biggest challenge we have is collaboration. Our people tend to be very individualistic; everybody wants to be chief executive officer.
Nobody wants to be identified as number two or three or part of the team and not be the team leader. Some tend to bend when they are working with someone that is much senior with a lot of expertise they can tap into so that they use that to do their own thing.
We should not underestimate the challenge that presents in creating scalable organizations. Konga has been successful, because Sim Shagaya is a fantastic leader.
There are not many people like that around; that is the truth. When you look at it from that perspective, one of the things I am spearheading talking to the government, private sector and anybody that cares to listen, is the need to develop our developers and designers.
We need to give them the skills; not only to ‘do’ technology, but to do the business of technology. We need to start from wherever we are now.
For instance, from September, 2014, in the United Kingdom, 6 year olds will start learning how to code in school as part of their curriculum.
It has become part of their curriculum. Those are the people our kids are going to be competing against in the future.
Back home, we are still trying to figure out what to do with the National Youth Service Corp (NYSC) programme and university graduates. There are six million Nigerians born every year. We need to start thinking about how we can help them to help us design the future.

Are You Calling for Infusion of IT Inclined Programmes into Secondary Education Curriculum?
I am on record as the one who failed woefully when we brought the one laptop per child initiative in 2006, otherwise known as $100 laptop.
It failed, because our environment was not ready for it. But take a look at what Rwanda has done with it. It has put nearly three percent on top of their gross domestic product (GDP).
We have to wake up to the fact that technology and computing have become an irreversible part of modern day life on earth.
Developing our national capabilities in this vein has become key to the future of our society and the sooner we get its exposure all the way to the primary level, the better we will become for what the country is going to be. That is just the reality.

Fusing IT Mentality into The Economic Paradigm
That is changing our mentality from oil to IT. We do not need to shout about it, because the situation will change our mentality for us. In the past, I was worried about that, but now, I am relaxed. The hand writing is on the wall.
The shale Oil and all kinds of renewable alternatives; when we start to see as we are already doing now, that our revenues are dwindling, as smart people we will start realizing there are other ways to create wealth.
Nobody told us before we started making money from music. How many studios have opened in Nigeria since then? Are we not partnering with international best studios? How about movies? All we need, just like I keep telling people, is for us to get half a dozen billionaires from contentsoftware and everybody will face software.
Fortunately, for us, it is just the beginning worldwide and that area of opportunity as I see it is near limitless for now.